Search Engine Submission Budget

Despite the rise in "paid participation" programs offered by search engines (as explained more on the Buying Your Way In page), free search engine submission is still possible. However, using the paid programs that are offered will speed up the listing process and almost certainly generate more search engine related traffic for your web site.

Given this, it is highly recommended that any site owner establish a search engine submission budget. This is true whether you are running a commercial web site, a "hobbyist" site in your own time or a site for a non-profit organization.

The Minimum Budget: Yahoo

How much to budget? At minimum, you MAY want to cover submission to Yahoo for one year. This is because the flat $300 annual fee that Yahoo charges to be in its human-compiled directory may help ensure that Google picks up your home page quickly in Google's crawler-based results.

Huh? Pay Yahoo to do well on Google? Google crawls the web and adds pages for free. To decide which pages it should pick up (and potentially rank well), it analyzes links from across the web). Being listed in Yahoo's human-compiled directory is potentially one of the best links you can gain, to influence Google.

It may also be that Google will find your page (and perhaps rank it well) even without the benefit of a Yahoo link. So, if money is tight, wait two or three months after you launch your site and see how you do. If you are doing poorly at Google, then spending the money with Yahoo may help you.

I Need To Be Listed Fast!

Often, those who launch new web sites want to appear in search engines right away. In these cases, you'll need to budget more money. By paying an "inclusion" fee to some of the crawler-based search engines, you can shorten the usual month delay of appearing to only a few days. The one-time fees are shown below, by the major crawlers that offer such programs:

I said these are one-time fees, but as later discussed, you'll see that they are charged on a six-month or yearly basis. Don't worry about that. For the bare minimum submission effort that this section discusses, calling them one-time fees is correct, as you shall see.

Paid Listings Are Also Fast

Another key option to getting listed faster is to consider using paid listing programs. The budget below will get you going for at least a month, in most cases. For LookSmart, it will cover you for a year.

Now let's put it all together. Here's the ideal amount you would budget, if you want to show up in the widest range of important search engines within a matter of days:

Again, you can get listed without spending a penny, as will be explained on the following pages. However, if your goal is to be seen right away in as many places as possible, you'll set aside the amount shown above, in the combined budget.